Mr. Toad's Bumpy Ride

Mr. Toad's Bumpy Ride

Surely it was late night gastrointestinal distress, I told myself upon opening my eyes. A bit too much dinner, that extra wide slice of pie.

For there I was sitting in the roofless jalopy, bouncing down rough dirt roads. And at the controls was a well-dressed gigantic toad. Or perhaps I, the car, and the landscape had all shrunk to his scale. Under either explanation, I felt my stomach torturously cast about inside my frame with my skeletal structure alternately compressed and stretched with each bump.

“Are we going somewhere?” I asked the driver. “Are we so terribly late that we need such haste?”

“We have made much progress, but we still have a long way to go,” the toad reassured me.

“But where are we going?”

“Forward” was his simple reply.

“Would we not get there at any speed? Must I experience such jostling and inner turmoil for so general a goal?”

“We were on the wrong road when I took the wheel,” explained Toad.  "It has taken almost until now to get back to where we need to start. And the other passengers have become rather impatient.”

Looking over my shoulder into the backseat, I now saw my fellow travelers. A Mole, a Rat, and a Badger. While Mole was enjoying the adventure, Rat seemed quite eager to have this trip end, reverse, or, at least, change course.  Badger, in the middle, was asleep.

“Oh, hello,” I said. “Glad to meet you. How are you chaps doing back there?”

“As well as can be expected,” replied Mole.

“We have not crashed yet,” commented Rat more glumly. “But be assured, we will.”

Badger quietly snored, unanswering.

“You seem quite unhappy to be on this trip, Rat. Why did you come?”

“For the company, I suppose. I scarcely was asked whether I wanted to come or not. Before I could state a single reasonable objection, we were speeding off. Who knows what cliff lays ahead, but Toad holds the belief that with enough velocity the car may simply learn to fly.”

“You are exaggerating again, Rat,” the Badger said in a soft rebuke without stirring. “Relax. Close your eyes and maybe you will see fewer imagined dire possibilities.”

“You do worry an awful lot, Rat,” said Mole in a gentle and friendly voice, “It really cannot be good for you to worry so.”

“Mole, my loving friend, you do not worry enough,” replied Rat. “You accept boon and bust with the same concession to inevitability as though you have no say one way or the other. 'All is for the best' and 'What will be will be'. You are not so insignificant as you chose to believe. Choices can be made, made by you, to guide you to the better and to avoid the worse.”

“But I do not need to choose, Rat. If the outcome of every event is known and selected in advance, how will we have any adventure in surprises and discovery? I would never have met you, Rat, or you either, Badger and Toad, if I stayed tucked into my comfy home under the tree,”

“He has a point,” Badger opened his eyes to state. “Peace and quiet are good for napping, but you achieve little if asleep all the time. The world keeps spinning and changing every day and you cannot hold it back, Rat. No matter how much you may wish. And you cannot know all the changes before they appear, so you are best to be prepared to adapt to what comes.”

“Everyone hold tight!” Toad warned excitedly. Moments later, the car was careening down an extra rocky slope with no sign of slowing in Toad's navigaton of the obstacles.

“Now, really, Toad,” Rat protested. “Use the brakes.”

“No time for that now, Rat,” shouted Toad. “It is only a brief shortcut, I think,” he murmured more softly as he wretched the path of the car around the larger nearly boulders.

“Wheeeeeee,” cried Mole as he poked his head into the front seat between Toad and me. “Oh, that was a close one; well done, Toad.”

“Perhaps you should sit back down, Mole,” suggested Badger, “and let Toad concentrate on his steering.” Mole returned to the seat behind me, but lean over the side of the car to watch the landscape go whirling past.
 
As Toad continued our plummet, I wished that I might too be in the backseat, if indeed I needed to be in the car at all. None of the travelers seemed to question the need for this precarious ride nor their presence here. Neither Mole's exuberant optimism nor Rat's fatalistic pessimism stirred Badger from his patient nonchalance. Toad assumed his command of the vehicle, but the route was perhaps less his priority than his distant goal. It felt like I had seen this circumstance being played out in my waking life as well, for I was surely like the snoozing Badger, ignoring the uncertainties and conserving my energies to deal with what will happen rather than worry or wistfully speculate about the too many possibilities.
 
In recognizing my dream state for what it was, it broke up into cerebral mist again. In the fog banks of my mind, perhaps these sprites will await their opportunity to stage some future drama about their bumpy ride or other adventures or humdrum in their lives together.